It isn’t made from oranges. It’s thousands of years older than the wine bar that sells it. And depending on who you ask, it’s either the most exciting thing to happen to white wine in decades or the most overhyped bottle on the list.
Orange wine has a colour like a late-afternoon sunset, a funky smell, a grip on the tongue, and an army of passionate fans and equally passionate sceptics. So which is it?
What it actually is
Orange wine is a white wine made the way red wine is made: the juice of ripe white grapes ferments on its skins and pips, usually for anywhere from a week to a year. That long contact gives the wine its amber colour, plus the tannin and texture you’d normally expect in a red. Decanter’s wine expert Simon Woolf sums it up as a white wine made as if it were a red.
Ancient, not new
The gimmick charge falls flat on history. Archaeological evidence from Georgia dates grape fermentation to around 6000 BCE, and skin-contact white wine is the traditional style there, made in clay vessels called qvevri. Georgians call it amber wine. The Soviet era pushed industrial wineries towards European-style white winemaking, which cut commercial production of qvevri skin-contact wine.
The modern revival happened next door, in northeastern Italy. Stanko Radikon returned to long skin maceration in 1995, and Josko Gravner committed to skin-contact wines from the 1997 harvest, switching to Georgian qvevri from 2001. They weren’t chasing a trend. Radikon was reviving what his grandfather did, and by one account he lost many customers when he switched his whole Ribolla Gialla production to seven-day skin contact.
A name that arrived late
The style is old, but the label is not. The term “orange wine” was coined in 2004 by David Harvey of UK importer Raeburn Fine Wines, while he was working in Frank Cornelissen’s cellar on Etna. Harvey has said he didn’t set out to invent a word; it just stuck. Some producers prefer “amber”, and Gravner is one of them. It’s a young category with no appellation of its own, and orange wines are officially labelled as white wine.
The case for genius
At its best, orange wine does what ordinary white can’t. The tannin gives it structure, so it stands up to food that normally defeats white wine: spice, smoky grills, cured meats, and fermented flavours. That tannin can be useful in gastronomy, which is why sommeliers love it on a menu with dishes that clash with both reds and whites.
It can also age. The most serious examples demand time in the cellar and glass, and Gravner and Radikon release their signature wines at seven years old. A gimmick doesn’t wait seven years to go on sale.
The case for gimmick
There’s a fair case against it, too. A trend this loud attracts opportunists. Colour is not quality, and some bottles are just flawed wines hiding behind a fashionable label. Decanter notes that critics sometimes mistakenly assume that amber colour signals oxidation, but a bad bottle can still be oxidised, vinegary or muddy, and the style’s popularity makes it easy to sell a mediocre one.
Some in the trade even question whether it needs a separate name at all. And in the end, the very tannic, long-macerated wines can be hardgoing if you expect the crispness of a white.
How to try it without regret
Start gently. Lighter styles with less skin contact are more approachable, with subtler phenolics and less of the full-on tannins of the extreme examples. A shorter-maceration bottle is a much friendlier first step than a six-month qvevri wine. As a common rule of thumb, serving it slightly cool rather than ice-cold lets the flavours show.
Then pair it with something bold: a curry, a charcuterie board, or roast chicken with herbs. If you like it with food, you’ve found the point of the style.
The verdict
Orange wine is genius in its technique and gimmick in its marketing. The method is thousands of years old, and the best bottles are worth the wait. The hype around it is where the gimmicks gather. So treat it like any style: ignore the label, trust the glass, and pick your producer carefully.
The category was formally recognised in 2020 too: the OIV made “white wine with maceration” an official category in November 2020. For a “fad”, that’s quite a stamp of approval.